Sending Sticks - Reaching Orhovelani in Thulamahashe - Part I

The every day, 3-phase, hundred and forty kilometre round trip was recurringly tedious. Arduously hot. It began by acquiring to the primary road at 6a.m., to wait there, to be picked up and bumped about on a hardened flatulence of tyres bloated to the extreme in an arrogant preference for efficacy of the speed machine. Gruellingly rough on the body. But, with the mostly lengthy, flat, straight, shimmery strips of tar on which the Boere* stock would put foot, not braking even for the few bends, the intolerable, incarcerated proximity to these hostile drivers in order to reach and return from the meeting point, amounted to an endurance of about only two hours, each weekday.

Mesmerising mountain ranges in the west towered hazy purple-blue over alternating plains of dry grasslands and encrusted, baked soil, with anthills, Acacia and Baobab trees perpendicular under the stretch of wide skied, infinite visibility leading to zero altitude at the Indian Ocean coastline.

On this when vastness of a wilderness poised in the stasis of fast vanishing, rural persons, natural to the setting, nonetheless at the pace that on foot can go, in diurnal migration via local survival, water carrying, fuel collecting, crop maintaining, social interchanging, livestock rearing, hut constructing, merely assuming transient lion, leopard, cheetah, elephant, deadly mambas as somewhat standard visitors for the downline of European interlopers grafted onto the scene, it's rather ordinary, speeding along very blasé to the privileged sight of giraffe, zebra, buck and warthog families appearing on national roadsides.

The journey would make transfer from the presiding, very first "mother 'country'", via yet another, and into a third. If travelling from 200km further north, the road would go from a fourth country, by way of the third and second, once more into the very first, second and third and so on. With three pre-existing national entities prior to extra, political divisions, when moving by way of the entire southern sub-continent, one could be traversing repeatedly, back and forth, blink-size fragments of twelve numerous territories, 'countries', split up, away from each and every other, stranded far and wide all over the land. A touring wonder of folks and property rent asunder by the ingenious 'Homelands Policy' of 'Separate Development'. A geographical legislation, enacted with enforced and brutal removal and re-settlement of substantial mass of population, in order to implement the philosophy and practical intent of racial superiority, which meant dregs of nothing for most and bountiful far more of the very best for the chosen few with the power and plenty to do, at whim and will, where, how, with whom and whatsoever they pleased to. The why, was unabashed proclamation of the perfect to overt acquisition of merely inevitable, omnipotent plenitude, pre-ordained by contract with an inherent deity at liberty to predilect all dictates of everyone's fate for the unilateral furtherance of 'His people'.

A central, federal department of education and training (D.E.T.) retained socially engineered control over schooling of all children in the entire, otherwise divided region. Party-line teachers from the mother country were seconded for service into all the subjugated others. In an inversion of US bussing, extended staff commuting turned literal wheels to perpetuate human experiment.

Adjacent to a portion of the country of Lebowa, in remote, mud and thatch hut settlements, xiTsonga speakers lived as neighbours in a segment of their country of Gazankulu. To reach Thulamahashe, the local centre of this outpost, required foray via some twenty kilometres of thick, sliding, slippery, sandy tracks, sludging mud after the beneficence of rains. This roadway, an arterial thoroughfare, facilitated unpredictable movement of unbridled dogs, goats, chickens, pigs, cattle, of pedestrian men, females and barefoot young children and assortment of vehicles. Such was the third and last phase of the every day drive to Thulamahashe, for which passage, following the route along national roads to arrive at a central meeting point, educational civil servants, charading qualification by bureaucratic agenda-issued diplomas of dubious intellectual merit, would regroup and embark staff Kombi transport to Orhovelani Senior Secondary School.

Tottering sandy ground on sinking high heels of quasi fashion parade, to perch incongruously on dusty seats in flowery flippancies of flounces, a bevy of blatantly course ladies would titter their eyelashes and twitter inane, sing-song conversatants in collusive allegiance to the prevailing political muster. Their biased patter included cooing the habitually drunken, gregariously bent headmaster, himself generously endowed with the ferocious, fanatical traits of Afrikaner Weerstands Beweging* philosophy and policy - a Meneer* Putter, he drove like a manic, depraved despot on a joy ride jaunt. In this transit were also an elderly, erstwhile farmer drawing conveniently large income supplement for "kaffir onderwys" [regrettably necessary quote* -AK], artisans' dreck wives and one, extraneous other. For a vibrant, young woman in the midst of this display, every single day, just going to work as a teacher in a school felt like an incursion, like she was on a cross border raid.

Once, a poorly clad, meagre boy of about 4 or five had the misfortune, whatever his motive, to give in to an impulse to throw a stone at the malevolent vehicle careening by. The headmaster's volatile reflexes suddenly sent the van into a drifting spin and lurched him from the driver's seat to chase and snatch the boy in sadistic drag by the scruff to a kidnapped fling on the rear floor. Oh, did the staff laugh, oh did they guffaw, point, snigger, chortle, hoot and clap out the merriment of their chanced sport. As the vehicle regained high speed and the boy writhed, screamed and contorted in his entrapment, the abductors redoubled in mounting mirth, mockery and deliberate glee, when he began to wet himself.

1 could smell his fear of those consumers, but they, also, reeked a sort of suppurating, lusty leak out of a primitive propensity for electing to satiate, to full intensity, a pleasure at inflicting arbitrary cruelty upon a mere chattel, a soulless vassal, who, by way of a moment of his own reckless stupidity had bonded himself into the captivity of their capricious game. In the mob mentality of rash, feudal degeneracy, his very mortality was at stake.

The vibrant young woman in the midst turned terrified girl, uncomprehendingly overwhelmed by the unfolding of horrific, unforeseen circumstance in the incredibly moments and space prior to her eyes. Outraged, incensed, in heightening, hectic, inner scream, she was besieged to cranial bursting with a compounding, heart thumping compulsion to unleash and expel a fist pounding, foot stamping protest of vitriolic, glass shattering screech:

"Stop it! Stop it! What the hell are you performing you savage, barbarian terrorists? Quit this van at once, stop this van right away! You cowardly worms, you hateful, evil despicables, you vile generates, you apparitions from hell... Quit this van! Stop this van at as soon as! Release him!".

She speaks a different language the deity of the stock that bred her is differently defined. She's from the large city, from one more white tribe, worlds far away. Confounded by fear and fury and outnumbered, she sees in their escalating seethe an obvious delight in her palpable alarm, it seems to be catalysing their zest to spur their torturous heinousness to ultimate harm. So she slinks into a chilly, tight-lipped, quivering sweat of jelly-like, mind-swirling, semi-consciousness and she tries to breathe an imperative calm of an eyes-closed forgiveness over the shame of her silent cowardice, whilst she prays, just prays. She prays, just prays a prayer, for herself, a prayer for a young boy, lying trapped underfoot on the floor at the back of a van, at the mercy of captors who have no mercy. The boy is screeching and she prays, just prays that he will not give in, she prays that they'll give up their game and she prays that the child's own angel will intervene and prevail his escape as outcome to the tale.

Prior to this era of life's moulding, the young woman honestly hadn't recognized a hint of the debasing realities that were everyday atrocity perpetrated all across the wide turf that was her house by birth. She didn't have a clue. Protesting students on university campus throughout tertiary studies provoked only her indifferent contempt at the inconvenience of their distracting noisiness. She'd had totally no idea that what they were on about may possibly be relevant, or important.

There was total news black out for the duration of the whole of her youth. Her household were too busy with their own yuppie trivia, material pursuits and rising climb to come out into upper class stairwells to bother themselves with gathering any impartial info that may possibly delineate the accurate state of the nation lurking just below a flimsy, diaphanous guise of "all's nicely with our lives".

There had been her childhood ponderings about 'Lizzie's' cramped, dark shack in the backyard and "why ought to she have a tin cup?", "where are her children?", "Daddy does nothing when the police bang down her door in the middle of the night, why do they take Moses away?". But for this type of child-mind wonderings, there would merely have been no forum to bring it to air. Adult mental idea that may have birthed some linguistic, discursive tool for articulating such content was, just merely, not there. Status quo. The 'is' just was. Signs of the child's instinct had been hinted at in naturally propelled acts of caring, but, interpreted as embarrassing, they were quashed, disregarded, or bypassed as quirk.

Soweto. 1976. Young children under the D.E.T. were revolting against compulsory, universal education in another's language, military vehicles were moving on children's protest marches in murderous assault, photos of the carnage had been getting relayed to the journalistic presses of other countries and destinations and the complete world was gone crazy at the loss of life score. But, she was sedentarily ensconced in quietly completing study of victor-told and written history for her own school leaving cert exams and she didn't know a factor of the history that was happening an half an hour's drive away from her educational developing. She didn't know about the death sentence, or it getting carried out in arbitrary, interrogation style scenario, exactly where people today 'fell from windows', where persons 'hung themselves', where district surgeons 'didn't definitely detect' injury to a prisoner with symptoms of cerebral haemorrhage to the extent that their head was a swelled mass of pulp the size of a football she didn't know about detention without trial, about pacifists spending 3 years of their prospective in jail rather than submit as military conscripts who would be necessary to shoot randomly at fellow citizens, men, women and kids. She didn't know she'd later have pals who'd be tortured sadistically, incarcerated indefinitely for the duration of extended treason trials for singing freedom songs, only to be acquitted without recompense for all their lost years. She didn't know about the gravity of poverty. She didn't know about the sickness of addiction to committing savage acts of institutional or subjective brutality. The design of her state schooling was privilege for a fortunate minority, denied to the majority she had not met, unless they came as representative individuals to be servants to her family members and live in the shack in the back.

She was praying. On the floor, underfoot, at the back of the van, the little, meagre boy was whimpering. She was praying, just praying. She had to reach out to him, transmit some courage to his being, that he mattered. She had to attempt and do some thing. She twisted around and tried to pass a discreet, comforting smile to him over the seat.

Her refusal to fire the abduction by countering it, deflated the frenzied dementia of the abductors and caused an anti-climactic that might rather nicely have saved the boys' life that day. To say nothing of urgent prayers that could possibly have lent sway...

For her, life itself was mutating and she would not once again be as she had been. If the boy received any message from that subtle visage that she turned to him, if he could see a smile that was worth something through the blur of his running nose, the tears pouring from his eyes and the spentness of getting from his terrified spasms, kicks, screams and writhes? The replay of his horror-filled, brown eyes can nonetheless be vivid she can still want to know if he did see her smile, that her face wasn't yet a different threatening grimace of a big monster leering down at him from a nightmare world. The 'teachers' lost interest in the boy and tossed him out the moving vehicle before they reached the school in very good time to conduct morning prayers, devotions and assembly.

She moved paralytic by way of that day, until the three-phase return journey released her by means of the door of her home to cry in safety at an inadvertent, violent daydream that wasn't going to end, a broadside that came out of nowhere that would continue to replicate and extend. She had to function. She had to see out the year. But reaching Thulamahashe became increasingly precipitous territory.

Ambrasia Kurtz

Boere - literally meaning farmer, but generally referring to a race / culture grouping, not at all times necessarily pejoratively
Afrikaner Weerstands Beweging - a regional political movement
Meneer - Afrikaans, meaning 'Mr'
kaffir - A South African (Afrikaans) word, infamously employed by bigots in a context of racial superiority for pejorative reference other language origins of the word suggest 'unbeliever'
onderwys - Afrikaans word, 'teaching'